Abstract
For over two decades, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s book Racial Formation in the United States has been a key text in the critical study of race and racism. Students and faculty across disciplines have and continue to rely on this text to work through and understand the racial landscapes on which we tread. It remains a widely cited text among researchers of race. And whether through critiques of it or praise (or both), it is a formable text in the field of critical ethnic studies.
This tension between critique and praise captures my own relationship with the text. I first read Racial Formation in the United States when I was a graduate student in the early 2000s. I had never heard of Omi and Winant before, but my instructor sung their praises, arguing that their work was important and essential for developing a nuanced and critical race analysis. As a graduate student, I found their analysis to be salient and innovative. Before Racial Formation, my understanding of race was grounded in the social, political, and economic asymmetries racism produced. I had not considered or even saw the value in an understanding how race, racial subjects, and racism were produced. Their concept ‘racial formation,’ which argues for an understanding of race as a social and historical category that changes depending on place, time, and condition, and not a biological fact, had a profound impact on my analysis of race and racism. As a budding scholar, it helped to make sense of the evolution of racism and White supremacy. And as an activist, it demonstrated to me that the history of racial oppression must and will change.
Unfortunately, their text did not find a place in my dissertation research (ironically, Howard Winant’s work did). As quickly as I had been introduced to them, I abandoned their work for analyses of race and racism that were newer and/or more in line with my thinking at the time. I saw their analysis as dated, too invested in historical excavation, and while their text was widely cited in much of what I was reading, I had moved on. I assigned a nice place for Racial Formation on my bookshelf and did not think I would return to it.
I was reintroduced to Racial Formation in the spring of 2010. I was a newly minted PhD and a new faculty member in the department of geography at the University of Vermont. Part of my teaching load was a large lecture on race and ethnicity in the United States. A colleague who was teaching the class showed me her syllabus, which had a selection from Racial Formation. Caught in the tension between having relegated it to my bookshelf and the shear utility of having read it, I decided to assign it in my class. That spring I reread Racial Formation for the first time in a decade and to my surprise I discovered that it was a powerful and effective teaching and research tool.
As a geographer, I use Racial Formation to instruct my students on formations of race in the United States and the forms of racism and White supremacy that accompany it. Their theory of racial formation and its “race-making” capacity, which produces racial subjects and the racial ‘other’ are valuable theoretical understandings of race and subject formation that students and scholars of geography should be exposed to. The concept of racial formation has many uses, for example, it provides a history of race making; it illustrates the role of social forces in the production of race and racism; it pushes back against fixed biologically determined notions of race; and it makes visible the role of race in the production of subjects, the nation, racial consciousness, the physical and social sciences, U.S. political culture, identity, subjugation, and resistance.
For geographers, racial formation is a useful theoretical tool to explore the spatial formations of racism. As human geographers of race, gender, sexuality, and political economy, we try to make sense of how historical and contemporary forms of subjugation and privilege, culture and identity, and politics and economy are manifest in spatial landscapes, processes of mobility and immobility, and access and containment. Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation provides a productive conceptual frame to think through what George Lipsitz (2011) terms the ‘racialization of space’. Segregation, internment, slavery, forced migration, suburbanization, and the theft of lands are forms of geographic racism that produced hierarchy and inequality. And they also produced racial subjects as well. Indeed, racial formation is inextricably linked to the racialization of space. Although Omi and Winant provide the conceptual tools, they do not offer a spatialized analysis of race and racism. Recent scholarship by race geographers, most notably, Wendy Chang’s (2013) work on mapping race and geography among Asian Americans and Latinos in Southern California and George Lipsitz’s (2011) work on the place of racism along the Black/White binary, explicitly draw on Omi and Winant’ concept of racial formation. Chang’s (2013) research reconceptualizes and extends their theory of racial formation by arguing it must be understood as a regional phenomenon.
Omi and Winant’s updated version (2015) extends their analysis of racial formation by arguing that race is a ‘master category’ in the United States. By master category, they mean that race plays a unique role in the ‘formation and historical development of the United States’. Race, they contend was used to form subjects, to make people, and to establish the ‘regimes of hierarchy, inequality, and difference’. I find this extension provocative but a bit troubling. On the one hand, the master category augment affirms the place of race in the production of social and political life in the United States. It makes clear that race has and continues to structure social hierarchy, domination, and inequality. On the other hand, the master category analysis, while recognizing the intersectional production of subjects and the forms of domination and/or privilege they are confronted with, overstates the role of race. Race, like gender and sexuality is ‘unique’ category but it is not a template for hierarchy, subordination, and the construction of difference. In this respect, race is not unique. It is like other forms of human classification.
A cascade of theories of race emanate from their theory of racial formation. They explore the role of race in the construction of politics, the nation-state, consciousness, religion, science, and the body, among other topics. Few texts on race attempt to cast such a wide net. Much of the research on race is scaled down in order to comprehend the intricate ways race and racism work. Omi and Winant’s ambition, however, does not mean less rigor. On the contrary, their analysis is innovative, insightful, and engaging. In short, but compact sections, Omi and Winant provide thorough analytical tools that deepen and extend their analysis of racial formation. These theories are vital for geographers. Racial Formation provides a reservoir of conceptual tools for geographers to investigate anti-Black racism, White supremacy, imperialism, and colonialism. In addition to this, their research creates an intellectual platform to understand and engage with the work of race geographers like Katherine McKittrick, Ronaldo Walcott, Laura Pulido, and the late Clyde Woods, whose theoretical work on race, gender sexuality, and space is the most cutting edge and sophisticated in the discipline.
This updated version also provides an analysis of racial politics in the postwar period. Through examining antiracist political movements and the reactionary responses and racial reforms they engendered, Omi and Winant map the political trajectories of the postwar period to the 1970s. Building on this, they examine contemporary analysis of race and racial formation in the age of Obama. Taking up the question of color blindness, Omi and Winant provide a much needed political history of its emergence and critique over its use. Given geographers’ attention to the role of economic modes of production in the exercise of power asymmetries (which far too often ignores the role of race), this chapter should be of interest as at explores racial formation, color blindness, and Obama with a focus on neoliberalism. Omi and Winant conclude by calling our attention to the ‘unsettled meaning of race and the continuing elusiveness of a genuine, substantive racial democracy in the United States…’ (p. 16).
This third edition of Racial Formation in the United States (2015) like the previous versions is a valuable tool. It will help geographers to think critically about race, racism, and racial formation in the United States while providing a foundational grammar and conceptual frame to enrich, complicate, and provide nuance to human geographic research.